First delivered at the Nottingham School of Art & Design, Scholarship of Teaching & Learning Conference 2023.
This meditation invites listeners and readers to de-center their perception of education and the knowledge economy and imagine a future where Web3 transforms experience.
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Relax into yourself
Into your chair
Into your centralised world
Feel its rigidity against your back
Hover above your eye line
Look down at your body
-
Zoom out
Observe your surroundings
Are you excited by the world?
The moment you inhabit?
Observe yourself
Do you feel free?
-
Worker bee happy in the hive
Listening to ideas
Trying to thrive
In the knowledge economy
In whose patriarchal shadow
We play in the cold
Like good like minnows
-
In the institutions
That we’re bound to and serve
Are we fair, are we open
Do we have stuff to learn?
-
What is our record of fairness and parity?
Where are we stuck
What’s the colour of our hegemony
Do we like the taste
Of what we’ve baked into our culture?
-
The stories we tell
Truths and observations
Are the stories of few
The ones invited
-
The science of men
Who conveniently overlook
The bodies of women
Who have to put up
With funding and money
Being syphoned, withdrawn
To the causes of man
Their bodies at the fore
The knowledge economy
So much for objectivity
-
The knowledge we grow
Fertilised by governments
Owners, companies
Shareholders
With heavy profits
Set up, with mercurial might
A system that stole
In the dead of the night
Our intellectual labour
Commodified and gifted
Which is sold, and is owned
By those centralised grifters
And closed behind a wall
By their appointed gatekeepers
Determined to keep
The work from creator
The future is coming
Maybe you heard
Of digital landscapes
Digital verbs
-
One mans imaginings
That one day came true
Science fiction
The futures not new
-
Utopias broken
Dystopias here
The metaverse beckons
Grab a digital beer
To 21st century colonialisation
Not land grab but brand grab
Semiotic appropriation
-
The rhizome is growing
No reason or rhyme
It duplicates, recreates,
Sign after sign
-
They’re telling us listen
To engage and observe
The stories around us
The way we converse
-
Universities aren’t separate
They’re not over there
They’re connected, by tendrils
To the verse you hold dear
-
The digital lands
We’ll inhabit so soon
Contested, imagined
Not proven, still new
-
Mirror consciousness
Reflect values and mood
Sustain intellectually
Enrich like good food
-
What do we stand for
Educated educators
University, poised
Ill prepared for what lies ahead
A digital entity
Ready for the Education-verse?
Set to build
A future we’re proud of
Not one off the shelf
Sold by centralised actors
-
Can my verse
Be your verse
Just don’t say the metaverse
Education-verse?
-
Function
Communication
Dialogue
Open to all
Open metaverse
Built by us all
Must be active participants
In our digital futures
-
But what of the centralised
Hegemonic norm
What of the future
If it won’t change its form
-
As lands emerge
Glistening shiny and new
Digital landscapes
To invite and entice you
-
As decentralised communities
Contract and connect
And the world co-operates
We need to ask what next
-
Do we build in our bubble
A centralised head quarter
A digital land
Lambs to the slaughter
-
Or do we imagine
As decentralised pilgrims
A different narrative
A story beginning
Where the digital lands
Can be rich
Can be moving
Can be open
Inter-operable
A utopia to be proven
Round the corner
Hidden
From sight and vision
Is a knowledge that’s shared
A knowledge that’s given
-
In ways that whisper
Shudder
Ask to be heard
Ideas that question
And challenge
And form into words
-
From pockets of earth eons away
From voices
Rejecting axis
They’ve been spinning for time
The knowledge economy
Draws a new line
Away from the north
Neoliberal woes
Look to corners unknown
-
Where stories are woven
Knowledge travels on the breeze
From the global south
To mouth to mouth to mouth
-
Our knowledge is passed
In the most vital way
To students
Who turn up to our classes each day
-
Screw the formal
And the centralised
Screw the knowledge economy
Let’s celebrate the personal
The human
A cultural society
-
Our stories are told through the classes we teach
But what if those classes extend beyond reach
If our classroom was open
Inviting
An invitation
To be forked
To be mimicked
A catalyst for creation
-
If round the world
People like you and like me
Employed by the centralised knowledge economy
Said I choose something different
I choose collaboration
I choose sharing
And dialogue
And open communication
-
What could education be
If we flew out our hive
If we shared our knowledge
As a mechanism to survive
-
Classes borrowed
Lessons shared
We could be valued and cited
Invited to take part
In conversations about science
In conversations about art
-
Could hold tokens
Representing value
Accrued by participation
In knowledge acquisition
Participation in culture
-
Our students would learn
From the network effect
Curated education
Openness
Respect
-
Breath
Deep breath
Feel your feet against floor
Be present in the room
Feel light
Imagine the possibilities
It we just let go
And said okay
Lets try being open